Everyone knows that mental health is closely correlated with physical, mental, and spiritual health. If you exercise and eat properly, your body will have a healthy immune system as well. When you sit on the couch eating junk food all day, your physical health diminishes and your emotional health declines as well. When Covid-19 hit the scene and masks and lockdowns were part of the recommended remedy, people obeyed and stayed home isolating from family and friends and treated their loneliness with alcohol, drugs, and news binge-watching. This resulted in a surge of mental health problems in everyone across the board. When access to food, medical, and income was limited, society, as a whole, began to collapse. As crime increased due to downsizing of law enforcement agencies, the world began to spiral out of control and fear and worry became the daily prescription.
Part of my job as a therapist is to look for the cause of emotional dysregulation. When clients come to my office many express they were "fine until Covid hit." The challenges they face are mostly due to the never-ending changing rules and limitations being introduced on a daily basis. Common questions are, "Should I wear a mask, or is it harmful to me and my children? Should I close my business and stay at home? I can't get healthy food because I can't afford it, what do I do? I can't afford gas to go to work and they are requiring I have a vaccine or test, but I can't find a test center anywhere." The final question they ask is, "When will this all be over so I can go back to living a normal life?"
I wish I had an answer for those questions, but I am not a doctor, so I refer them to their medical provider. I'm not a Human Resource officer, so I refer them to their company HR. I am not a tax accountant, so I can't help them with their taxes. Even though I cannot provide all the answers they seek, I do tell them to focus on themselves and those in their sphere of influence. Stop focusing so much on all that is wrong in the world. When you look for solutions to what you can control, you'll be amazed at how much health will blossom in your life.
One area where you have control is to realize that coronavirus is nothing new. According to an article in Psychology Today, At the Cold Front (February 2022 pg 17), "Research indicates that 15 percent of common colds are, like COVID-19, caused by a coronavirus." It goes on to say there are over 200 "other respiratory bugs." The articles says that we can be proactive in our personal health by increasing vitamins A, D, and Zinc. When we have deficiencies in these vitamins we are more susceptible to assaults against our immune system. The article concludes how infections can do more harm emotionally, "Much of it is part of immunie defense, inflammation is ultimately a destructive process, a known disruptor of mental function and implicated in every mental illness."
I hope we are reaching the end of that insanity...but I am skeptical. So, my recommendation is you focus on controlling what you can, accept the things you can't, and live according to your truth and not the lies of others.